I'm looking for a way to record fast analog signal for a particle detector. The detector as a response time of about 100 MHz so I'm looking into a 200 MHz - 500 MS/S scope such as the 2208. I will need to record about 20 us @ 500 MS/S (10 KS) after an external trigger. A typical experiment requires recording about 5000 such waveforms at a repetition rate of 10 Hz

Is the block mode fast enough to transfer each waveform and keep up with the 10 Hz rep rate? Otherwise, I'm guessing I'll need a model with much larger memory and store all 5000 waveforms?

Also is it possible, using the SDK, to use a different timebase/sampling rate for each channel?

Hi I just tested this on my computer and it works perfectly, following settings:

2us/div
A pulse that repeats every 100 ms
5000 waveforms
10kS
500MS/s

total time was 8 mins and 20 seconds, which equates correctly.

The question I have for you is why do you want to capture all 5000 waveforms?
You can still capture all waveforms but setup a mask and then show only the waveforms that have failed. Have a look at the video below:

Thanks for the quick reply and testing! Seems like the 2208 will work for me.

The reason I need to capture every waveform is because the signal is not really repetitive and I need to measure its evolution over the course of the experiment. This requires quite a bit post-processing and analysis like peak finding/fitting and integration to extract the information out of the signal. So it's much easier for me if I can save all the raw data.

I have a similar requirement but with different values for the number of samples, sampling rate and repetition rate of block acquisition.

I would like to record blocks of 1k samples from 1 channel at 200MS/s. However, I would like to record 5000 of these blocks per second, to fill-up the hardware memory of e.g. 512MS . Only after the memory is full will I need to transfer the data to the PC via USB.
The start of the blocks will be externally triggered.

I'd like to know if it's possible to concatenate the acquired blocks in scope memory prior to transmission to PC via USB?

The effective streaming rate of this type of acquisition is 1k*5k/s = 5MS/s, which is much higher than the effective streaming rate requested by the user egwis; 10k*10/s = 0.1MS/s. So I'm not sure the rapid transfer for individual blocks will work.

Rapid block mode is designed for this purpose, and enabled in PicoScope6 by selecting RapidTrigger.

This mode collects multiple blocks of data to the memory of the scope in response to a repeating trigger event and then when complete transfers the complete data set to the PC. The trigger re-arm time between the blocks will be about 1usec, compared with the 1ms to 60ms of the normal block mode of operation.